As the number of applications available for performing tasks on a computing device increases the expectation for a seamless user experience among these applications also increases. When working in one application, there is an expectation that the transition to other applications and/or support of the other applications is seamless and does not interrupt the user from their tasks to handle the transition.
One type of application that has gained great ground in its integration and use among companies and enterprises are portal server applications. Portal server applications enable enterprises to develop an intelligent portal that seamlessly connects users, teams, and knowledge so that these users can take advantage of relevant information across business processes to help them work more efficiently. A portal server application provides an enterprise business solution that integrates information from various systems into one solution through single sign-on and enterprise application integration capabilities. The portal facilitates end-to-end collaboration by enabling aggregation, organization, and search capabilities for people, teams, and information. Users are able to find relevant information quickly through customization and personalization of portal content and layout, as well as by audience targeting. Organizations are able to target information, programs, and updates to audiences based on their organizational role, team membership, interest, security group, or any other membership criteria that can be defined. Document versioning, approval workflow, check in and check out, document profiling, and publishing provided through the portal server application facilitate easy collaboration on documents, projects, and tasks.
Web based technologies used by some web portal server applications and other data driven web applications are typically limited to hypertext markup language (HTML), or controls embedded in HTML, for rendering views of the data on the web site. More recently, some applications such as spreadsheet applications, presentation applications, and other rich applications are able to provide a rich view on this data, allowing for quick filtering, sorting, and editing, without the limitations of HTML. The problem is that these two worlds are presented to the user as quite different and not very well connected. To use these rich views to view the portal server data has often required that the user know that this is possible. Also the user is generally required to launch the application themselves manually. Furthermore, management of the storage of these rich views is left to the user, with that storage typically not nearby where the data that was being viewed lives.